Hey, as Pierre Lacroix might explain if he were explaining, which he's not, better late than never.

A number of us urged the Avs to bring back Patrick Roy a year ago, after they fired head coach Joel Quenneville. The passion had disappeared from Avalanche hockey, and if there's one thing you can count on from Roy, it's passion.

Unfortunately, the organization was deceiving itself about the state of the team at the time. This has become a pattern in recent years.

They were too good for a rookie coach. General manager Francois Giguere went so far as to say the Avs could contend for the Stanley Cup if things fell right. The only thing that fell right was Giguere's team, straight to last place.

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We don't know whether this delusion played into Giguere's firing last month. Lacroix has lowered his cone of silence again, an image that seems increasingly apt. If Maxwell Smart is involved somehow, that would explain a lot.

A year ago, Roy was also coaching his sons, which made him OK with staying put in Quebec. Now that they have moved on, the case to bring Roy back to Colorado is based on neither nostalgia nor illusion. It does not require him to build a second career that rivals Scotty Bowman's. It simply acknowledges that the Avs aren't very good and aren't likely to be very good anytime soon, thanks to Giguere's mismanagement of the salary cap.

As a result, they could use a gate attraction.

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They sold an average of just more than 15,000 tickets per game last season, which ranked 26th in the NHL. With a $53 million payroll, it's not clear how much money they lost, but it's probably a lot.

That's trouble these days. Giguere said he didn't think the acres of empty seats at the Pepsi Center were a referendum on his team. The scary part is he might have believed it.

The Avs got so good at patting themselves on the back during their incredible early run here that they began to believe their own propaganda.

They aren't yet Al Davis, but if they keep bragging on the past and ignoring the present, that's the direction they're headed.

A year ago, Roy was somehow a bizarre, outside-the-box coaching candidate, despite being as intimately acquainted with the NHL as anybody alive. Maybe it had something to do with his suspension a couple of months earlier from the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League for instigating a fight from behind the bench. This, of course, is unheard of in the NHL, as Marc Crawford will tell you.

But the league is nothing if not environmentally friendly, so it recycled, as it often does. Giguere brought back Tony Granato for an encore as coach, three seasons after Granato was demoted to make room for Quenneville.

The subtext was that everything was fine, as always, and a players' coach with an up-tempo style was all the Avs needed. It turned out that they weren't good enough to play an up-tempo style without exposing their slow, overpaid defense. So they pulled it in, as they did under Quenneville, and ended up scoring 199 goals all season, fewest in the league. They gave up 257, tied for fifth-most.

In other words, they're bad. And not getting appreciably better anytime soon unless this year's third overall draft pick is an instant star. As my colleague Adrian Dater has pointed out, they have more than $43 million committed to 13 players for next year, including a killer $19 million to defensemen Scott Hannan, John-Michael Liles, Brett Clark, Ruslan Salei and Adam Foote.

The Avs' nominal vacancy is in the GM's office, but Roy is an unlikely paper-pusher, as he has said himself. And let's face it — Giguere's contractual handiwork will tie his successor's hands for a while. Ultimately, the Avs need more talent, so the next GM should be a proven talent scout, which Roy is not.

This is a team with no goaltender and a single star in Paul Stastny. Whether or not Joe Sakic elects to play another season, the Avs face a full-fledged rebuilding job. The sooner they quit denying it, the sooner they can get on with it.

In the meantime, Roy will at least keep it interesting. Maybe it'll turn out he can coach. Maybe not. But what exactly do they have to lose?

One-day event to run slide down University HillIt's not quite the alternative mode of transportation that Boulder's used to, but, for one day this summer, residents will be able to traverse several city blocks atop inflatable tubes.